I have been writing about technology, people and companies for more than 25 years. I've written for most of the major industry publications, including PC World, Infoworld, Computerworld, eWEEK, and others. Send comments, questions, ideas for columns, etc. to me at david (at) coursey.com. Circle me on Google+

Happy Birthday, Bill Gates! You Made Steve Jobs Possible

Happy birthday to future Nobel Peace Prize winner Bill Gates, who turned 56 on Friday. Among his many achievements is having made the Steve Jobs we remember possible.

For without Bill, Steve would have watched Apple implode after his 1996 return from exile. No iPod, no iTunes, no iPhone, no iPad. Probably no Macintosh

More on that in a moment.

After Steve’s death, friends of mine used the occasion to compare Jobs to Gates, generally giving Steve benefit of every doubt and piling on Bill.

That just isn’t right.

Not to take anything away from Steve, but who would you rather have as a next-door neighbor? The guy best known for his reality distortion field and nasty disposition or the guy who is spending his billions wiping out polio and malaria?

Would you prefer the guy who denied paternity of his first child — while mom collected welfare — or the guy who made himself an expert on tropical diseases so he could help save Africa’s children from them?

Would you rather sit down with the guy who convinced Warren Buffet to likewise give away his fortune, or the guy not known for having given away any of his own?

Bill Gates has been unjustly vilified many times over the years, but time has been good to him. Our grandchildren will remember Gates not for Microsoft but for curing diseases, helping the poor and improving education. That’s why I think he and his wife, Melinda, will win a Nobel.

Most of the anti-competitive practices Gates was accused of, Apple actually carried out. At some point, Apple may face an anti-trust reckoning for its control of an entire ecosystem of entertainment and information.

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The solution to Malaria is already out there, we used it to eradicate it I the USA decades ago, it’s called DDT! Thanks to unproven claims it was banned by the USA and then other nations followed our lead by banning it. In the meantime countless thousands have died unnecessarily!

Sorry to interrupt your hagiography of Gates with reality, but here’s the real story: While Jobs asked permission to use the mouse/gui from Xerox, Gates “borrowed” Windows from the Mac. (Reverse engineered the system into a very poor version which Windows users still suffer with.) See The Pirates of Silicon Valley. That $150 million bucks (depending on which Silicon Valley rumor you subscribe to) was either a payback or guilt money; and/or given because without Jobs, there’d be no Windows, no MS. Everything Gates has done has been a (often-failed) copy of Jobs’ work. iPod becomes Zune for example, a crude and failed copy if ever there was one. As far as Gates donations to various causes, I’d guess that’s his wife’s doing. In one case, education, I can say (with the expertise of one who’s been listed in Who’s Who in American Education) that Gates educational projects have the same bound-to-fail emphasis on technical “training” that is found in Bush’s “No Child Allowed to go Ahead.” I don’t wonder that Forbes magazine, a crony publication of the C students who run most American corporations, finds Gates’ rejection of brilliance to be praiseworth. As for me, I’ll take Jobs viewpoint any day of the week: Students need to study the humanities, the disciplines of art and science in order to create useful objects of beauty. Gates made his fortune by marketing badly-copied products to those C students — not very smart folks — who run corporations — therefore supporting their lack of brilliance.

Bill said he’d give away his money, as best I remember, long before he met Melinda French. If you want to give credit, it’s Bill’s parents who are responsible. His mom, Mary, was on the national board of United Way, which led directly to Bill’s introduction to IBM. I did not comment on Gate’s educational efforts. I will mention that Jobs told Obama that went to China because he needed to hire 30,000 engineers and could not do that here. Wonder how much choir practice and graphic arts those engineers got in school?

Couldn’t agree more, David. Of course, I think that Melinda’s upbringing and Catholic school education had a lot to do with it, along with Bill’s promise to his mother and dad not to create “entitled, spoiled” grandchildren. Melinda’s family has a long history of philanthropy, as does Bill’s, and both of them used the money that Microsoft earned to carry on their parent’s legacy. Which is another difference between Bill and Steve: like me, Steve was adopted. And so very many of us are narcissistic, self-centered people because we were denied that most basic human connection with blood relatives. So the world should thank Bill and Melinda’s parents as much as the couple themselves, for raising children who grew into billionaires who didn’t forget childhood lessons of giving.

Bravo, well said. Im glad to see there are people who truly pay attention to what is going on in the computer world. This “i” trend, will soon pass and be done with. And once that is said and done, the Standardized giant, MS, and the man maker Linux/Unix platforms will once again get their much deserved respects for staying the course and being a platform that the world NEEDS, and can depend on. And for not being a fly by night, fad to waste time and money on.